Where is Bloomfield?

Blackpool, Britain’s premier coastal resort, has a long history of leisure and entertainment stretching back to the 19th century, particularly for working people and their families.

 

The Bloomfield, Foxhall, Revoe and near South Shore area of town is a rich mix of houses, churches, hotels, trades and Old Blackpool, incorporating:

 

 

·     the site of the original Blackpool village

·     the 19th-century “main street”

·     the town section of the internationally famous Golden Mile

·     Blackpool Football Club

·     the town’s Tram and Bus Depots

·     the Mecca club that gave birth to Northern Soul

·     the Illuminations Depot, where Blackpool’s annual light displays are designed and made. 

 

At the heart of Bloomfield Talks is a team of local volunteers brought together specifically for the project. Ranging in age from late teens to late seventies, the volunteers have engaged other local people in conversations and activities focusing on their daily lives in the area. 

 

The volunteers have been documenting these exchanges in writing, pictures and audio recordings, creating a new archive of records about ordinary people’s lives. This archive is available here for you to browse and search, and to add your own experience of the area online.

 

In February 2009, the volunteers will edit and publish the new archive as a book, which will be launched at a celebratory event in Bloomfield and given away as a gift to the five thousand households in the area. The original material will be lodged with Blackpool Libraries and the North West Sound Archive.

 

What is Oral History? 

Bloomfield Talks is an oral history project. Oral history documents the experiences, memories, feelings and opinions of ordinary people through any medium. You might think of oral history as sound-recordings of older people recalling past aspects of their lives - but while oral history certainly can include this, it is also much more. 

 

Any past experience is a valid subject for oral history, whether it happened yesterday or forty years ago. And anyone’s experience is valuable to document, regardless of whether they are eight or eighty, a prince or a pauper. Similarly, oral history material can be documented in any way we choose - it doesn’t have to be only sound-recording. The ‘Bloomfield Talks’ volunteers have made use of creative methods like writing, photography, video, computer simulation, collage and drawing as well as sound recording to compile this new local archive.

 

Oral history is really about significant detail – it attempts to make visible those aspects of people’s lives that are often forgotten in the histories that are told by academic historians, public records and the media. This means that oral history is more a people’s type of history than anything else – it aims to record what you think is significant in your life and make it visible and available for people in the future.

 

Who we are

Bloomfield Talks is being developed, facilitated and managed by Simon Grennan and Vik.

 

Simon Grennan is part of international artist team Grennan & Sperandio, who have been making artwork in collaboration with others since 1990.

 

Vik is an English artist inspired by history and memory. She is interested in participatory, collaborative art, with people who don’t necessarily call themselves artists.